July 2016

Poor “Cariocas” living in the periphery of the Rio Metropolitan Region spend a very long time commuting. People from the city’s outskirts travel, on average, almost 90 minutes a day to and from work. Despite important improvements in the quality of mass transit in the metro region, Rio still has more to do to maximize the accessibility benefits of its recent major investments in rail and bus-based transit systems. Infrastructure still needs to be designed and upgraded to facilitate transfers between different motorized and non-motorized transport modes. And services (municipal and intermunicipal buses) need to be better coordinated and integrated with mass transit modes.

Bicycles can play an important role in solving the first and “last mile” problem (in fact, they offer a solution for the first and last three miles!) and in promoting sustainable transportation. The integrated bicycle-mass transport solution makes public transport much more attractive for users living within a radius of 5 kilometers from a mass transit station. At this distance, it would take a commuter 15 minutes to ride a bike to a station compared to an hour of walking. Not only does bike and rail integration improve quality of life by promoting health and reducing travel times and emissions, it can also result in benefits for transport operators in the form of increased ridership.

For this reason, in addition to financing new energy-efficient trains for the suburban rail system, our Project in Rio is supporting a bike-rail integration program, including financing for the development of the program’s business model and for the acquisition of a small number of bicycles to pilot the venture.

Today 400,000 school-age Syrian children living in Jordan and Lebanon are not in school. The situation is even worse in Turkey where 433,000 school age refugees are out of school, according to UNHCR estimates. In Iraq’s Kurdistan region, more than 27,000 children are out of schoolز

Blog #11: Since 2005, fewer jobs for women in India

India is home to the largest number of poor people in the world, as well as the largest number of people who have recently escaped poverty. Over the next few weeks, this blog series will highlight recent research from the World Bank and its partners on what has driven poverty reduction, what still stands in the way of progress, and the road to a more prosperous India.

We hope this will spark a conversation around #WhatWillItTake to #EndPoverty in India. Read all the blogs in this series, we look forward to your comments.

Female labor force participation in India is among the lowest in the world. What’s worse, the share of working women in India is declining. This is a cause for concern since higher labor earnings are the primary driver of poverty reduction. It is often argued that declining female participation is due to rising incomes that allow more women to stay at home. The evidence, however, shows that after farming jobs collapsed post 2005, alternative jobs considered suitable for women failed to replace them.

Last month, I traveled to Mexico to attend the launch of the country’s national financial inclusion policy.

The launch was an important milestone for the country, since just 44% of adults have access to a financial account, according to Mexico’s latest national survey on financial inclusion. The policy outlines a vision of how to extend access to formal financial services to the unbanked half of the population, and provides a roadmap for how to get there.

Worldwide, there are 2 billion unbanked adults and the international development community considers financial inclusion necessary to reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity.

Mexico accounts for 2.6% of that global number. The country is also among the 25 countries the World Bank Group and partners have prioritized in the Universal Financial Access by 2020 initiative. The goal of this initiative is to enable access to a transaction account to store money, and send and receive payments by adults who are not a part of the formal financial system.

Transparency and accountability in government actions are increasingly recognized as central to economic development and political stability. Where citizens know the rules that govern their society and have a role in shaping them, they are more likely to comply with those rules. Corruption is lower and the quality of regulation is higher. In addition, citizen access to the government rulemaking process is central for the creation of a business environment in which investors make long-range plans and investments.

Among the 185 countries sampled by the Global Indicators of Regulatory Governance, 138 notify the general public of a proposed new regulation before its adoption. Most countries that give notice are either high income OECD economies or located in the European and Central Asia region.

“Any good political psychologist should have the moral and historical imagination to see how he or she could become almost any ideological creature that has existed, or does exist on the planet. That includes Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, Isil … There but for the grace of God.”

-Philip Tetlock, a Canadian-American political science writer, currently serving as the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is cross-appointed at the Wharton School of Business and the School of Arts and Sciences. His research explores a variety of topics, including: the challenges of assessing "good judgment" in both laboratory and real-world settings and the criteria that social scientists use in judging judgment and drawing normative conclusions about bias and error.

He has written several non-fiction books at the intersection of psychology, political science and organizational behavior, including Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction; Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?; Unmaking the West: What-if Scenarios that Rewrite World History; and Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics. Tetlock is also co-principal investigator of The Good Judgment Project, a multi-year study of the feasibility of improving the accuracy of probability judgments of high-stakes, real-world events.

Political instability, corruption, & unreliable electricity are the key impediments to firms’ growth in the Middle East and North Africa according to 6,000 firms surveyed across Djibouti, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Palestine and Yemen. Read more in "What's Holding Back the Private Sector in MENA?"

Well-functioning tax systems allow countries to chart their own futures and pay for essential services such as education and healthcare.
(Photo: Curt Carnemark / World Bank)

This week, the World Bank, together with the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Co-Operation and Development, and the United Nations, submitted recommendations to the G20 on how we can best work to strengthen the capacity of our client countries to build fair, efficient tax systems. Responding to a request the G20 made in February, and working as the recently-formed Platform for Collaboration on Tax, we dug deep into our collective years of policy-setting, technical advice, and on-the-ground experience to arrive at guidance for providing assistance and suggestions for funding that work. In short, we looked at how best we could help.

Fear of openly confronting politics can come in the way of achieving economic development goals. To help address this problem, the Development Research Group of the World Bank prepared a report synthesizing the vanguard of economics research on the functioning of political markets to understand the implications. It yields insights for strengthening existing transparency and citizen engagement policies with potentially powerful consequences for economic development everywhere, in poor and rich countries alike.